With the resignation of Gareth Ward this morning, shortly before his expected expulsion from Parliament, a by-election will be needed to replace him in Parliament. The Kiama by-election should happen soon, likely in September.
I won’t be delving into the issues around Ward’s legal situation, or the potential expulsion – the focus here is entirely on the impending by-election.
There has been a clear trend in all Australian elections over the last twenty years of voters moving away from voting on election day, with an increasing number of voters choosing pre-poll voting as an alternative.
Now that we have the final booth results for the Tasmanian state election, I’ve decided to add another chapter to a series of blog posts analysing the geographic trends of individual candidates within each party within each electorate. You can read my blog posts about the 2021 election and the 2024 election here.
Casting a formal vote in a Tasmanian lower house election isn’t the easiest vote to cast, but in some ways it’s easier than it would be in other places.
While the overall seat numbers in the Tasmanian House of Assembly have been very stable, that disguises more changes at the level of the individual MP.
For today’s post I am going to look at the statistics for how many MPs were replaced at each Tasmanian election, and how 2025 compares to the historical trend: MPs retiring before or at the election, or losing their seat, either to another party or to their own.
If you’ve been following my live blog, you would have seen that the preference count in the Tasmanian state election finished on Saturday, with the count in Bass being in doubt right up until the end.
Tasmania’s Hare-Clark system is proportional, but it’s not purely proportional. Each division elects seven members, and results are not just about how many votes each party receives – results are dependent on how preferences flow and how votes split within each party’s ticket.
1:33pm – In the electorate of Lyons, Liberal candidate Guy Barnett was elected first, but with only a very small surplus. His colleague Jane Howlett was just 22 votes short of a quota, so his surplus has elected her. She now has a surplus of 172 votes, and those will be distributed next. That shouldn’t take too long. After that, they’ll start knocking out the lowest-ranked candidates.
During the federal election count, I identified a number of issues with the data being published by the AEC. Two main issues emerged, where the AEC’s estimates did not seem to be correct.
Now that the Parliament has officially opened for its first sitting after the federal election, we’re off to the races with redrawing the electoral map for the next federal election, expected in 2028. No rest for the wicked.